excessive italics, alias gothic-punk

[ursula]

Friday night I went to the Merc with various SCA friends. The Merc is a private Goth club, so naturally I spent a good fraction of the time thinking, "Dude! Vampire: the Masquerade!" I chatted with sablebadger about heraldic politics, with scourgeotheseas about my hunt for an advisor, and was told by yimisty's very cute, small, Southern, drunk mother, "Don't tell nobody, but all the guys are talking about how sweet and pretty you are." (Why, thank you, Badger!)

Yeah, I know, I'm not very Goth.

If I ever do have a Vampire character based on the Merc, she will be a Trivial Pursuit fiend.

***

On Sunday I finished matociquala (or, as the title page reads, elizabethbear)'s novel Hammered. One can't say a novel starts slowly when a kid splatters blood all over the first few pages, but I did think the story was slow to focus. In part because I do read matociquala's journal, and thus have seen bits of her reviews, and comments on the worldbuilding, and have acquired the unjustified belief that I can affect what she writes, the info-dumping stood out too strongly. I already knew that the US had decayed and that Canada was a superpower by default and that global warming had done horrible things and that The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a good book, I wanted to cut to the plot already, not the intricate backstory, the plot, and did it really have to be Feynman?

But when the plot starts going, oh does it go. Hammered really is as satisfying a gritty near-future action novel as I had hoped it might be, and with extra spaceships. (Though I wonder, writing this, if grit is the right word. The characters don't seem quite resigned enough for grit, despite all the bourbon: they're edging closer to realms of despair, and of true love.)

Comments

[meril.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I only read the bits on matociquala's journal that had nothing to do with the book--so I didn't notice the infodumping at all.

I did seriously appreciate the small divisions of the book. It's the perfect book for reading in 5-minute bits during the workday.

[ursula]

Whereas I wanted a bit less jumping around, early on . . . I'm guessing that you and I have different impatiences as readers, though: when I read epic fantasy, I usually want to take a big pair of scissors, remove all the viewpoint characters who annoy me, and reduce to a two-hundred-page book. (Whereas I'm perfectly happy with, say, War and Peace . . .)

[shazamaramack.livejournal.com]

Do you know Cat's screenname or e-mail? I'd really like to talk to her, but she screens comments on here so I don't know if she got mine and I've been searching her websites and various places for some kind of contact info and have come up short. =(

[ursula]

Sure, try cattifer at gmail.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

The characters don't seem quite resigned enough for grit, despite all the bourbon: they're edging closer to realms of despair, and of true love.

Thank you for saying that. *g* I never thought of them as all that gritty, either, and almost all of them are motivated by their ideals.

[ursula]

And I got the sense that the emotional wounds hadn't scarred over, which makes for a much cleaner line of motivation.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* My dirty little secret--because I am a character-driven writer, and my primary motivation as a writer (other than 'tell cool stories') is "explore an emotional arc," I can't write healthy people.

Actually, I don't believe in healthy people. I think we're all survivors, we all have damage--and that's where the interesting stories lie. So yea, I think you're right-on with that.

[ursula]

I took a poetry workshop class a couple of years ago, which was full of brilliant young women (and maybe two guys), and therefore produced a lot of feminine-angst poetry. I found myself in occasional conflict with a girl who may as well be called C., because stories that were horrific to her were blackly funny to me.

Hell, yeah, we are all survivors. C. was writing about bulimia, I was writing about my sister . . .

I'm reading Hammered against Bold as Love (and therefore against Byatt's Babel Tower, because Byatt's series and Jones' series are very close in my system of associations). So what interests me is not just the degree of damage but the extent to which the characters are aware of their own pain-- Fiorinda is numb, compared to Jenny Casey, and paradoxically that makes Hammered rather less bleak.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

That's some pretty rarified competition there--

One of the things that I wanted to do with Jenny, actually, is just that. She's damaged, but she's aware of her damage... she kind of embraces it. Not in the drama llama sense, but--she's self-accepted. She's like, okay, I'm a maintenance alcoholic and my life is shit, but so what? I'm just trying to do a little good here--

I dunno. It makes more sense in fiction than spelled out...